Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Georges Didi-Huberman conceptualizes the notion of the “aura” after Walter Benjamin’s famous and elusive rendering of the term. The central focus is on the way in which Didi-Huberman theorizes the aura to showcase its capacity for transformation – specifically in terms of its connection to “place” and in terms of what he calls a “memory trace.” After an introduction, the article is divided into five sections, followed by a conclusion. The first two sections act as a foundation from which to investigate Didi-Huberman’s engagement with the aura. Therein, I explore the aesthetic debates surrounding what kind of knowledge artworks can produce and specifically how language can, most reductively, objectify the way in which artworks are critiqued, on the one hand, or produce elusive and romantic readings of artworks, on the other. Furthermore, I explore the way in which the notion of aura is engaged in Benjamin’s work upon which Didi-Huberman largely draws for his own understanding of the term. The subsequent two sections outline what I call Didi-Huberman’s two-part proposal of the aura re-imagined; this entails what he calls the “supposition” of the aura and the “secular” aura. Didi-Huberman takes Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings as a point of entry to think how the aura can be hypothesized after Benjamin. In the final section, I look to the artworks of James Turrell as they are investigated by Didi-Huberman and to one of his short books, Being a Skull, to describe how artworks can function as vertiginous places, which implicate our conception of space in general. Didi-Huberman’s “dialectics of place” both complexifies Benjamin’s equating of place with the aura as uniqueness and smooths over some edges of his paradoxical thinking.